Many Millions Watched LoL's World Championships

Folks together watched 360 million hours of the League of Legends [official site] 2015 World Championships across its five-week tour, say developers Riot Games. That’s a lot. Here’s the figure I like: “cumulative daily unique impressions” hit 334 million viewers, which I’ll disingenuously pretend is 334 million unique individuals rather than a flashy pointless statistic because it’d let me dick about with numbers myself.

Did you know that if you flayed every one of those 334 million, you could sew a skinquilt big enough to cover all of Bermuda – with room to spare for Gibraltar and Vatican City to come round for a sleepover? Also, that you are never more than 2.15 kilometres away from someone who watched it? Not anywhere. There’s a tethering system to space everyone out.

334 million would, of course, be over 4% of the world’s population but that figure means nothing to anyone. Let’s bring it into the universal measurement of elephants, in which case those viewers combined would weigh as much as 7 million Asian elephants. (For our friends down in The London, that’s 2.2 million Borisbuses.) They would also have as many eyes as 334 million elephants (Asian or African).

If they all ate a bar of Dairy Milk and didn’t burn off the calories, it’d turn into almost a billion kilograms of fat. I’d tell you how large a fatcube that would make, but you’d never sleep again.

If you drained the bodily fluids of those viewers and distilled them correctly, you could easily stay pissed for life on the naturally occurring alcohols alone.

Sadly, “cumulative daily unique impressions” is just a running total of how many viewers tuned in on each day of broadcast. However, I’ve not received official confirmation that Riot don’t plan to make a rotting skinquilt.

Riot do also say that the games had an average concurrent viewership of 4.2 million, and that peak viewership in the finals was 14 million. That’s probably a useful number to know. You could actually make Gibraltar a full set of skinsheets from those viewers.

All the numbers are dramatically up over last year, basically. I’d helpfully translate those numbers into something meaningful, but I’m now imagining being wrecked on all that humanhooch and I just know I’d be curious and drunkhungry enough to lick the fatcube and I need to pop outside for some fresh air.